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First of all, in the context of science, you should never speak of evolution as a “theory.” There is no theory about whether or not evolution happens. It is a fact.

Scientists have, however, developed tested theories about how evolution happens. Although several proposed and tested processes or mechanisms exist, the most prominent and most studied, talked about, and debated, is Charles Darwin’s idea that the choices of nature guide these changes. The fame and importance of his idea, natural selection, has eclipsed the very real existence of other ways that populations can change over time.

Evolution in the biological sense does not occur in individuals, and the kind of evolution we’re talking about here isn’t about life’s origins. Evolution must happen at least at the populationlevel. In other words, it takes place in a group of existing organisms, members of the same species, often in a defined geographical area.

We never speak of individuals evolving in the biological sense. The population, a group of individuals of the same species, is the smallest unit of life that evolves.

To get to the bottom of what happens when a population changes over time, we must examine what’s happening to the gene combinations of the individuals in that population. The most precise way to talk about evolution in the biological sense is to define it as “a change in the allele frequency of a population over time.” A gene, which contains the code for a protein, can occur in different forms, or alleles. These different versions can mean that the trait associated with that protein can differ among individuals. Thanks to mutations, a gene for a trait can exist in a population in these different forms. It’s like having slightly different recipes for making the same cake, each producing a different version of the cake, except in this case, the “cake” is a protein.

Charles Darwin, who didn’t know anything about alleles or even genes (so now you know more than he did on that score), understood from his work and observations that nature makes certain choices, and that often, what nature chooses in specific individuals turns up again in the individuals’ offspring. He realized that these characteristics that nature was choosing must pass to some offspring. This notion of heredity–that a feature encoded in the genes can be transmitted to your children–is inherent now in the theory of natural selection and a natural one for most people to accept. In science, an observable or measurable feature or characteristic is called a phenotype, and the genes that are the code for it are called its genotype. The color of my eyes (brown) is a phenotype, and the alleles of the eye color genes I have are the genotype.

What is nature selecting any individual in a population to do? In the theory of natural selection, nature chooses individuals that fit best into the current environment to pass along their “good-fit” genes, either through reproduction or indirectly through supporting the reproducer. Nature chooses organisms to survive and pass along those good-fit genes, so they have greater fitness.

Fitness is an evolutionary concept related to an organism’s reproductive success, either directly (as a parent) or indirectly (say, as an aunt or cousin). It is measured technically based on the proportion of an individual’s alleles that are represented in the next generation. When we talk about “fitness” and “the fittest,” remember that fittest does not mean strong. It relates more to a literal fit, like a square peg in a square hole, or a red dot against a red background. It doesn’t matter if the peg or dot is strong, just whether or not it fits its environment.

One final consideration before we move onto a synthesis of these ideas about differences, heredity, and reproduction: What would happen if the population were uniformly the same genetically for a trait? Well, when the environment changed, nature would have no choice to make. Without a choice, natural selection cannot happen–there is nothing to select. And the choice has to exist already; it does not typically happen in response to a need that the environment dictates. Usually, the ultimate origin for genetic variation–which underlies this choice–is mutation, or a change in a DNA coding sequence, the instructions for building a protein.

Don’t make the mistake of saying that an organism adapts by mutating in response to the environment. The mutations (the variation) must already be present for nature to make a choice based on the existing environment.

The Modern Synthesis

When Darwin presented his ideas about nature’s choices in an environmental context, he did so in a book with a very long title that begins, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.Darwinknew his audience and laid out his argument clearly and well, with one stumbling block: How did all that heredity stuff actually work?

We now know–thanks to a meticulous scientist named Gregor Mendel (who also was a monk), our understanding of reproductive cell division, and modern genetics–exactly how it all works. Our traits–whether winners or losers in the fitness Olympics–have genes that determine them. These genes exist in us in pairs, and these pairs separate during division of our reproductive cells so that our offspring receive one member or the other of the pair. When this gene meets its coding partner from the other parent’s cell at fertilization, a new gene pair arises. This pairing may produce a similar outcome to one of the parents or be a novel combination that yields some new version of a trait. But this separating and pairing is how nature keeps things mixed up, setting up choices for selection.

With a growing understanding in the twentieth century of genetics and its role in evolution by means of natural selection, a great evolutionary biologist named Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) guided a meshing of genetics and evolution (along with other brilliant scientists including Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Simpson, and R.A. Fisher) into what is called The Modern Synthesis. This work encapsulates (dare I say, “synthesizes?”) concisely and beautifully the tenets of natural selection in the context of basic genetic inheritance. As part of his work, Mayr distilled Darwin’s ideas into a series of facts and inferences.

Facts and Inferences

Mayr’s distillation consists of five facts and three inferences, or conclusions, to draw from those facts.

The first fact is that populations have the potential to increase exponentially. A quick look at any graph of human population growth illustrates that we, as a species, appear to be recognizing that potential. For a less successful example, consider the sea turtle. You may have seen the videos of the little turtle hatchlings valiantly flippering their way across the sand to the sea, cheered on by the conservation-minded humans who tended their nests. What the cameras usually don’t show is that the vast majority of these turtle offspring will not live to reproduce. The potential for exponential growth is there, based on number of offspring produced, but…it doesn’t happen.

The second fact is that not all offspring reproduce, and many populations are stable in size. See “sea turtles,” above.

The third fact is that resources are limited. And that leads us to our first conclusion, or inference: there is a struggle among organisms for nutrition, water, habitat, mates, parental attention…the various necessities of survival, depending on the species. The large number of offspring, most of which ultimately don’t survive to reproduce, must compete, or struggle, for the limited resources.

Fact four is that individuals differ from one another. Look around. Even bacteria of the same strain have their differences, with some more able than others to with stand an antibiotic onslaught. Look at a crowd of people. They’re all different in hundreds of ways.

Fact five is that much about us that is different lies in our genes–it is inheritable. Heredity undeniably exists and underlies a lot of our variation.

So we have five facts. Now for the three inferences:

First, there is that struggle for survival, thanks to so many offspring and limited resources. See “sea turtle,” again.

Second, different traits will be passed on differentially. Put another way: Winner traits are more likely to be passed on.

And that takes us to our final conclusion: if enough of these “winner” traits are passed to enough individuals in a population, they will accumulate in that population and change its makeup. In other words, the population will change over time. It will be adapted to its environment. It will evolve.

When Darwin presented his idea of natural selection, he knew he had an audience to win over. He pointed out that people select features of organisms all the time and breed them to have those features. Darwin himself was fond of breeding pigeons with a great deal of pigeony variety. He noted that unless the pigeons already possessed traits for us to choose, we not would have that choice to make. But we do have choices. We make super-woolly sheep, dachshunds, and heirloom tomatoes simply by selecting from the variation nature provides and breeding those organisms to make more with those traits. We change the population over time.

Darwin called this process of human-directed evolution artificial selection. It made great sense for Darwinbecause it helped his reader get on board. If people could make these kinds of choices and wreak these kinds of changes, why not nature? In the process, Darwin also described this second way evolution can happen: human-directed evolution. We’re awash in it today, from our accidental development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to wheat that resists devastating rust.

Genetic drift: fixed or lost

What about traits that have no effect either way, that are just there? One possible example in us might be attached earlobes. Good? Bad? Ugly? Well…they don’t appear to have much to do with whether or not we reproduce. They’re just there.

When a trait leaves nature so apparently disinterested, the alleles underlying it don’t experience selection. Instead, they drift in one direction or another, to extinction or 100 percent frequency. When an allele drifts to disappearance, we say that it is lost from the population. When it drifts to 100 percent presence, we say that it has become fixed. This process of evolution by genetic drift reduces variation in a population. Eventually, everyone will have it, or no one will.

Gene flow: genes in, genes out

Another way for a population to change over time is for it to experience a new infusion of genes or to lose a lot of them. This process of gene flow into or out of the population occurs because of migration in or out. Either of these events can change the allele frequency in a population, and that means that gene flow is another was that evolution can happen.

If gene flow happens between two different species, as can occur more with plants, then not only has the population changed significantly, but the new hybrid that results could be a whole new species. How do you think we get those tangelos?

Horizontal gene transfer

One interesting mechanism of evolution is horizontal gene transfer. When we think of passing along genes, we usually envision a vertical transfer through generations, from parent to offspring. But what if you could just walk up to a person and hand over some of your genes to them, genes that they incorporate into their own genome in each of their cells?

Of course, we don’t really do that–at least, not much, not yet–but microbes do this kind of thing all the time. Viruses that hijack a cell’s genome to reproduce can accidentally leave behind a bit of gene and voila! It’s a gene change. Bacteria can reach out to other living bacteria and transfer genetic material to them, possibly altering the traits of the population.

Evolutionary events

Sometimes, events happen at a large scale that have huge and rapid effects on the overall makeup of a population. These big changes mark some of the turning points in the evolutionary history of many species.

The word bottleneck pretty much says it all. Something happens over time to reduce the population so much that only a relatively few individuals survive. A bottleneck of this sort reduces the variability of a population. These events can be natural–such as those resulting from natural disasters–or they can be human induced, such as species bottlenecks we’ve induced through overhunting or habitat reduction.

Founder effect: starting small

Sometimes, the genes flow out of a population. This flow occurs when individuals leave and migrate elsewhere. They take their genes with them (obviously), and the populations they found will initially carry only those genes. Whatever they had with them genetically when they founded the population can affect that population. If there’s a gene that gives everyone a deadly reaction to barbiturates, that population will have a higher-than-usual frequency of people with that response, thanks to this founder effect.

Gene flow leads to two key points to make about evolution: First, a population carries only the genes it inherits and generally acquires new versions through mutation or gene flow. Second, that gene for lethal susceptibility to a drug would be meaningless in a natural selection context as long as the environment didn’t include exposure to that drug. The take-home message is this: What’s OK for one environment may or may not be fit for another environment. The nature of Nature is change, and Nature offers no guarantees.

Hardy-Weinberg: when evolution is absent

With all of these possible mechanisms for evolution under their belts, scientists needed a way to measure whether or not the frequency of specific alleles was changing over time in a given population or staying in equilibrium. Not an easy job. They found–“they” being G. H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg–that the best way to measure this was to predict what the outcome would be if there were no change in allele frequencies. In other words, to predict that from generation to generation, allele frequencies would simply stay in equilibrium. If measurements over time yielded changing frequencies, then the implication would be that evolution has happened.

Defining “Not Evolving”

So what does it mean to not evolve? There are some basic scenarios that must exist for a population not to be experiencing a change in allele frequency, i.e., no evolution. If there is a change, then one of the items in the list below must be false:

·Very large population (genetic drift can be a strong evolutionary mechanism in small populations)

·No migrations (in other words, no gene flow)

·No net mutations (no new variation introduced)

·Random mating (directed mating is one way nature selects organisms)

·No natural selection

In other words, a population that is not evolving is experiencing a complete absence of evolutionary processes. If any one of these is absent from a given population, then evolution is occurring and allele frequencies from generation to generation won’t be in equilibrium.

Convergent Evolution

Arguably the most famous of theegg-laying monotremes, the improbable-seeming platypus. License.

One of the best examples of the influences of environmental pressures is what happens in similar environments a world apart. Before the modern-day groupings of mammals arose, the continent of Australiaseparated from the rest of the world’s land masses, taking the proto-mammals that lived there with it. Over the ensuing millennia, these proto-mammals in Australiaevolved into the native species we see today on that continent, all marsupialsor monotremes.

Among mammals, there’s a division among those that lay eggs (monotremes), those that do most gestating in a pouch rather than a uterus (marsupials), and eutherians, which use a uterus for gestation (placental mammals).

Elsewhere in the world, most mammals developed from a common eutherian ancestor and, where marsupials still persisted, probably outcompeted them. In spite of this lengthy separation and different ancestry, however, for many of the examples of placental mammals, Australiahas a similar marsupial match. There’s the marsupial rodent that is like the rat. The marsupial wolf that is like the placental wolf. There’s even a marsupial anteater to match the placental one.

How did that happen an ocean apart with no gene flow? The answer is natural selection. The environment that made an organism with anteater characteristics best fit in South America was similar to the environment that made those characteristics a good fit in Australia. Ditto the rats, ditto the wolf.

When similar environments result in unrelated organisms having similar characteristics, we call that process convergent evolution. It’s natural selection in relatively unrelated species in parallel. In both regions, nature uses the same set of environmental features to mold organisms into the best fit.

Note: This explanation of evolution and how it happens is not intended to be comprehensive or detailed or to include all possible mechanisms of evolution. It is simply an overview. In addition, it does not address epigenetics, which will be the subject of a different explainer.

Deborah is the first Mexican woman to graduate with a physics PhD from Stanford University. She is a physicist, author, and media personality whose initiatives to popularize science have impacted thousands of people around the world. Her passion is to popularize science and motivate young minds to think analytically about the world. This has led her to pioneer learning initiatives in schools and universities in Mexico, Africa, the US and Israel. She is a frequent public speaker and has been recognized by numerous media outlets such as Oprah, CNN, WSJ, TED, DLD, WIRED, Martha Stewart, City of Ideas, Dr. Oz Show, Celebrity Scientist and others. She regularly appears as a science expert on different international TV networks; currently she is the TV host of National Geographic’s “Humanly Impossible” show. And she will appear on the Discovery Channel’s upcoming show ‘You’ve Been Warned.’ You can find Deborah on Twitter, or on her blog, Science With Debbie. You can also find Deborah telling her story for The Story Collider.

DXS: First, can you give me a quick overview of what your scientific background is and your current connection to science?

I grew up in Mexico City in a fairly conservative community, and as a child, I was discouraged from doing and studying science. My parents, family, and peers would all ask, “oh, why don’t you study a more feminine career?” Although I was pretty good in school, I wasn’t exactly a math wizard. I used to say that I loved philosophy and physics – because philosophy was a deep discipline of asking questions about the world. And physics studied the world itself.

It was clear when I was born that my personality waswas quite different to the one of my mom. When I was growing up, my mom was scared because she didn’t know what to do with this little girl that was smart and always asking questions. She is not a naturally curious person, so she kept trying to tame down my curiosity and kept telling me not to tell boys that I was interested in math and science because I would never find a husband. According to her, the life goal for a girl was to find a husband, have kids, and that’s it. Women didn’t have to have a career. (Not that there is anything wrong with not having a career.) My high school teachers and counselors were not so different and encouraged me to go into philosophy or literature, not into math or physics. And my friends in school told me I literally had to be an out of the world genius to be able to study physics.

Given the circumstances, I started studying philosophy in Mexico. There were some classes with logic, and some with a little bit more math, and those were the ones I just devoured! And, at the same time – secretly – I was reading the biographies of scientists. For some bizarre reason, I was hugely attracted to their life stories. I didn’t have any family members, or anyone else for that matter, that had pursued a career in science, so I didn’t have a mentor or a role model. I felt an extreme kinship with Tycho Brahe, who in the late 1500’s was locked in a tower, doing all of these calculations for years, hated by everyone in the town. Go figure! I felt some kinship with these scientists. But I didn’t have the courage nor the means to switch majors. I did confess that I wanted to study another area (physics), but in Mexico one cannot study two majors. So, I studied philosophy for two years.

In the middle of it, I felt way too curious about science and I decided to apply to schools in the US. It was hard at the time because college in Mexico was a lot cheaper than in the states. At the private school where I was attending, my tuition was about $5,000 per year. If I were to come to the US, I would be looking at costs exceeding $35,000 per year. I couldn’t really ask my dad to help me with that price tag so I started to apply everywhere and anywhere that had scholarship opportunities.

I ended up getting a letter from Brandeis

University saying that they would let me take this advanced placement test and write an essay, which, if I did well, would give me a full scholarship. I received a full Wien Scholarship and was to continue studying philosophy in the US. This was probably the nicest thing that has ever happened to me because it opened the path of opportunity.

Brandeis transformed me as a person – I saw females doing science! But, the bravado moment that changed my life was a very general course called Astronomy 101. The teaching assistant, Roopesh, was a very sweet man from India and he saw that my eyes would just light up when I was in that class – I was much more curious than the random student that was just taking it to fulfill some requirement.

At the end of that year, Roopesh and I

were walking around Harvard Square and stopped to sit under a tree. I started to tell him, with tears in my eyes, that I just don’t want to die without trying. What I meant by that is I don’t want to die without trying to do physics. Everyone’s questioning of my decision made me question my actual ability. Everyone telling me ‘no’ hampered my development. I mean, I was good at math, but I definitely didn’t have the same background as all the kids coming in with advanced math and physics courses.

I told Roopesh that I don’t even remember how to solve the equation (a+b)2 – even my algebra was rusty! But, he believed in me and went back to his professor and told him my story. This professor decided to meet with me and ends up telling me about someone who had done this sort of thing in the past. His name was Ed Witten and he went on to become the father of string theory.

He said “Witten had switched from history to physics, and I will let you try too.” With that, he handed me a book on vector calculus called ‘Div, Grad and Curl’ and told me that If I could master it in three months by the end of the summer, they would let me switch my major to physics and also let me bypass the first two years of course work. This would allow me to graduate by the time my scholarship ran out.

I have never in my life experienced the level of scientific passion condensed into such a short amount of time and I am jealous of the person I was that summer. I had so much perseverance and focus. I don’t think I can ever reproduce that intensity again. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, and even in my dreams, I only thought about physics. Roopesh, who became my mentor for the summer, taught me.

I always wanted to pay Roopesh for his tutoring, but he would never accept any money. He told me that when he was growing up in the mountains of Darjeeling in India, there was this old man who would climb up to his home and teach him and his sisters English, the musical instrument Tabla, and math. Roopesh’s father always wanted to pay the old man for his tutoring, but the man always declined. The man said that the only way he could ever pay him back was if Roopesh did the same thing with someone else in the world. And by mentoring me, Roopesh fulfilled his payment to the old man.

Out of that, that became a seed for my physics journey and purpose. It is now my life’s mission to do the same for other people in the world – especially women – who feel attracted to science but feel trapped. They for some reason, whether it is social, financial, etc., just can’t find the way toward science. That is the motivation that dictates my actions.

I was able to pull it off and graduated Brandeis Summa Cum Laude with highest honors in physics and philosophy. I went back to Mexico afterwards to figure out what to do next and to spend some time with my family. At the same time, I did a master’s degree in physics at the largest university in Mexico UNAM. My curiosity for physics didn’t diminish and in 1998, I randomly applied to two physics PhD programs in the US. I applied very, very late, but, fortunately, I won a merit-based full scholarship from the Mexican government who provided me with funding, which made it easier for me.

Because I loved biophysics, I did a search on who was doing this line of research. I came across Steven Chu, who is currently the secretary of energy. At the time I was applying, he was at Stanford and was one of the first to manipulate a single strand of DNA with his ‘optical tweezers.’ To me, his story was fascinating! Without really knowing who he was other than what I found on the web, I wrote him an email asking him if I could work in his lab. Had I known who he was – that he had just won the Nobel prize in 1997 – I would have been too intimidated.

I was admitted to Stanford and was invited to work with Dr. Chu, but after two years I decided to switch labs. As expected, it was a very challenging environment and having only studied two years of physics at Brandeis, I wasn’t as prepared as most of the other students. I struggled for the first two years. Everyone worked so extremely hard at Stanford and there I was, struggling to be the best, but, in the beginning, I couldn’t even be average.

Fast forward four years. I had worked my butt off and ended up becoming the first Mexican woman to graduate with a PhD in physics from Stanford. It was the best day of my life – I kept thinking that I was so blessed to have my parents live to see this! It was so moving, I was crying so much and I couldn’t believe what had happened. My friends had flown in from all over the world to be with me. It was amazing.

When people hear what I do, they – especially teenage girls – feel intimidated. But, when they hear the whole story, their tune changes. I tell them that I know what it is like to not understand something. I was not the kind of person where comprehension of my science came naturally. But I did it. And if I can do it, anyone can do it! My story can be inspirational to someone who comes from a background completely lacking in science because they, like me, can reach their goal.

DXS: What ways do you express yourself creatively that may not have a single thing to do with science?

I was always a very curious girl growing up. I had a lot of interests, one of which being theatre. I wanted to be an actress when I was young, but my father didn’t let me pursue that as a career, which was probably a good idea. But, during high school, I went to an after school drama program. I wrote my own plays – three of them – and performed one of them. I was in heaven when I was on stage.

In NY, I have tried to do a little bit of that. Of course, I’ve never done any big roles, but I will be an extra in a film, or if there is a small production being made in Spanish, I will play a part. It doesn’t matter how big the role is – I just love doing something creative and getting into a character.

DXS: What types of productions and/or films have you done?

I don’t think I would come up in the credits as an extra, but I did a movie with Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst and Megan Fox in the movie “How to lose Friends and Alienate People.” It was a very, very fun film! In theatre, Jean Genet, who is a French playwright, has a play called The Maids, and I was the madame.

DXS: Do you find that your scientific background informs your creativity, even though what you do may not specifically be scientific?

Debbie talking to the TEDYouth audience about waves.

I have a concept that I call “physics glasses.” And what I mean by that is, for me, physics is not a subject that you just teach in a complex way in a classroom. Rather, physics is something that is related to everyday life. From the moment you wake up, you can just put on your physics glasses. It is a mode of thinking – it is a way where although reality can be very rich and diverse, physics goes very deep and it abstracts commonalities, general principles that apply to many things. To give you an example, I asked the kids in the audience of my TEDYouth talk, “what do the sun, the ocean, and a symphony orchestra have in common?” When just looking at them on the surface, there isn’t much in common. I mean, they are all beautiful things but they are not obviously related. But, to a physicist, they are all waves. You have sound waves, light waves, and water waves and you can interchange many of the concepts in physics to explain all three.

Where most of us see the world with our eyes through light waves, other might see the world differently. Take, for example, my friend Juan, who is blind. He “sees” the world with sound waves – he senses sound as it bounces off the objects around him. Through this, he can bike, play basketball, and do a load of activities using sound as a guide. This is one of my favorite analogies because, really, physics “infects” the way I see the world.

Deborah the Physicist model

To give you a more specific example in the creativity realm, when I got to NY, I felt really un-feminine. When I was studying physics, I felt that if I was even slightly feminine, I wouldn’t be respected. It didn’t help that some of the other women in the physics program at Stanford were more of a “guys girl,” always wearing a baseball cap and t-shirts. Now, since I am Latin, I first showed up wearing a skirt to class, but I quickly learned to dress down. Looking feminine would assure that no one would talk to me in class.

So, when I got to NY, I had an explosion. I wanted to know what it was like to express myself as a woman and my friend suggested that I do some modeling. So I did. It was a brief, lasting about a year. But during that time, my friend, who was a designer from Mexico, asked me to work with her and I wrote and did some videos about the physics of fashion, which also included the physics of high heels video.

Some people could consider fashion to be superficial, but not me. I love fashion and color. But, other scientists generally looked down upon you for liking this sort of thing. This fueled my desire to prove to everyone that there actually is science everywhere, including fashion, and that they shouldn’t be snobs about it. There is complex science in how different materials work, how they interact with the environment and you can prove to the women, like my mother and friends back home who think that science has nothing to do with their everyday lives, that it has EVERYTHING to do with it. So I talked about a Newtonian theory for color – how to pick the right color for you based on how much light the color would reflect on that day, etc.

DXS: Like a more sophisticated version of colors based on your “season?”

DB: Exactly!

I also did pieces on the materials, including some of the newest engineering accomplishments with fabric. For example, I hooked up with a woman and helped her to design a fashionable and very scientific coat. It ended up costing $11,000, but it was made up of nano fibers and it had a patch in it that could detect the temperature and the probability of rain. Based on this probability, it could change permeability of the fabric. It was a very light coat that was comfortable in nice weather, but when it would rain, it would become impermeable to water once it detected a high probability of rain, transforming into a raincoat.

DXS: That’s incredible! I wish it wasn’t $11,000!

DB: Yeah, that’s usually the problems with these technologies. They are often so novel, but one day I’m sure we can figure out how to make things like this scalable.

Science is very much what guides my thinking when I am being creative and I wish I had more time to do creative things while being influenced by a scientific mindset.

DXS: It is so cool that physics has such an incredible overlap with everyday living. Like, when we take a shower, I want to know “how is the water getting pumped from the ground or through pipes and make its way out of the showerhead?” But, as a biochemist, I often find it hard to relate everyday things to biochemistry, but I would like to!

DB: Its funny that you say that. When I try to teach girls that the worst thing they can do is memorize. Critical thinking is so important and they shouldn’t take anything at face value, and they should even question teachers and authoritative figures in their lives. Always ask: what goes into making this? Why is this here? Why is it this way and not another? Constantly ask questions. That s the gift that physics will give you.

DXS: Have you encountered situations in which your expression of yourself outside the bounds of science has led to people viewing you differently–either more positively or more negatively?

Without saying I am a scientist, I can tell you that people have come up to me and told me that before they even hear me speak, they think I am dumb. They are usually surprised that I am smart! I think it is because I am bubbly and friendly and that often makes an impression as being unintelligent. For them it seems that if a woman is intelligent, she is very cold and distant and serious.

I’ve met a lot of physicists, and yes, some of them do tend to be that way, often as a reaction to how others treat them. Or, people would say to me that, because I am Latin, my cultural identity comes across as being warm and the last thing they’d expect me to be into was something as cold as physics. So yeah, I have definitely been judged so many times!

It even happens in my current job on Wall Street, especially with my male peers. When there are off site client meetings, I’m often accompanied by my male sales colleague. Sales people are generally required to know less about the complexities behind our risk models compared to someone on a more research-oriented role, like me and he will bring me along to these sales meetings in case the potential client has more sophisticated questions that go beyond what he can comfortably answer. Many times upon meeting the clients for the first time they think that I am the sales person, there to be the smiling face to sell them something, and that he is the risk modeler. They always direct their mathematical questions to him.

It came to a point where I became so annoyed that I decided to stop caring. Now, my sales colleague goes out for drinks with the clients and I know that I am going to be invisible. So I don’t go anymore. I know that I am always going to struggle to get the full intellectual respect in that industry – it will always be a challenge.

DXS: Have you found that your non-science expression of creativity/activity/etc. has in any way informed your understanding of science or how you may talk about it or present it to others?

Yes, absolutely. For example in Mexico, unlike the US, you absolutely have to do an honors thesis project as an undergradin science. Because I had already studied philosophy for four years, I wanted to do a thesis project in philosophy. But I also wanted to do one in physics. I recall that back in 1997, when you presented a dissertation in front of the physics community, if you had any power point, forget it. You would be immediately be called dumb or not a good physicist. Because, who takes the time to do something fancy! If you had any color in your presentation, forget it!

So, literally, the smartest students in physics were people who didn’t really communicate that well, or didn’t really speak English that well, or just didn’t really make an effort. Their slides were on those overhead projector things with those rolls of plastic sheets, and most of their talks were so confusing and couldn’t be interpreted! But they were respected! It was just assumed that if the formula looked complex, they were probably right.

So what I did was completely different. I infused my talk with my spiciness and color. I did an artwork of liquid crystals, which was my research at Brandeis. Liquid crystals are little cigar-shaped molecules that actually make up the screen of your laptop. If you pass an electric field through them, they all orient themselves and that is how we can use them for displays in our laptops and TVs.

I colored these cigar-shaped molecules with purples and reds and greens, and I tried to explain it at the most basic level. This is because of one my philosophy professors in Mexico, who told me that if you cannot explain what you do to your grandmother or 6 year old niece, you don’t understand what you are doing – I loved it!

And I said to myself that I shouldn’t care what they think. I pretty much expected to not gain a lot of respect from the physics department, but it had the opposite effect! I actually had one of the professors from that department come up to me and tell me that he had never really understood what a liquid crystal looked like or what it really was! He said that “finally I understand [liquid crystals] because of your drawing. Thank you!” It was incredible!

To see the effect on people and from then on, I bounced up in down, I made jokes, I put in creativity. It doesn’t always have a great effect on very serious audiences, but the younger generation is definitely appreciative. When it keeps going well, you gain confidence. And, for me, I even started wearing high heels to the next talk. When someone commented about my attire, I would counter, hey I have a PhD!

DXS: How comfortable are you expressing your femininity and in what ways? How does this expression influence people’s perception of you in, say, a scientifically oriented context?

This question is deep and a little bit of a struggle at the moment. This is because I still have that fear – when I arrived in NY, I did that short stint in modeling and I expressed myself and I would dress very creatively – just like my other girlfriends who were not scientists. But I did feel a little bit of a backlash. By that I mean that I would post a photo of myself on Facebook or something like that. They were pretty pictures, not at all seductive or provocative, and my high school mates, usually male, would write me saying: “I always knew you as a serious person and you have achieved so many things – I am just telling you for your own good that this can really damage your image.” That made me reply with “so you’re telling me that being smart is actually kind of a bummer?” That actually means that I have to dress very differently from what other women wear for the rest of my life?

I remember feeling very upset about all of that. I think that not being taken seriously is still a little bit of a fear of and I think my website has damaged my serious image a little bit. As a scientist, I was very secluded from the outside world. I didn’t have a lot of friends when I moved here, but I did know an amazing and powerful woman who happened to be the CEO of Blip TV. She was insisting that I do videos! So she invited me to her place and showed me how to do video. Being the quick woman that she was, she asked me to make up a name for myself on the spot. When I didn’t answer, she instantly coined “The Science Babe” for me. I was like, sure, what a cool idea!

It was kind of a cute name, but because English is not my first language, I don’t always understand some of the cultural connotations associated with some English words. A few months later, I started to get a few emails from mothers who were upset that I was using my looks. They would say things like “Are you saying that women have to be in the kitchen or wear short skirts to be scientists?” I would answer that no, that was not it at all. I would further explain that I was trying to change the definition of “babe.” If you are smart, if you are empowered, you will be a babe no matter how you look. I am trying to shift what people think of when they think “scientist.”

I don’t feel quite successful with The Science Babe. It seems like there are quite a few people, especially some from the older generation, who say that they’d love to introduce me to fancy science organizations but are worried that the name “the science babe” will make it difficult. Also, I had the BBC wanted to talk to me about doing a TV show in NY, and then they said but there’s so much bad stuff out there about you! And I was like, what do you mean? They answered “All these things with the “science babe” brand…”

It doesn’t happen all the time, but some people are really critical about the science babe theme, citing that its way too feminine. Other female scientists that haven’t gone that route have perhaps discounted my seriousness about science. They assume that what I am doing is not really that important because I do focus on the science everyday life, which is simpler, and it is too much color and too much vivaciousness for our field. I feel like my femininity has decreased over the last few years because I’ve been too nervous about not being taken seriously. It s almost like the balance tipped the other way. I feel like perhaps I’ve feminized things to a fault and now I want to appear more serious. So, I am changing my website to “Science With Debbie” because I really felt the backlash.

It is a struggle to find the balance between being able to express my femininity and presenting myself in a way that people will take me seriously. In a way, I wish I had a little more courage to not care that much about what people have to say about the science babe but, unfortunately, agents have told me that if I don’t go to the “dumbed down version of femininity” I would get better speaking engagements. Being feminine has literally affected my career, and it’s because of other people’s perceptions. I’m never going to be bland, but I will try to change things so I am more serious

DXS: Do you think that the combination of your non-science creativity and scientific-related activity shifts people’s perspectives or ideas about what a scientist or science communicator is? If you’re aware of such an influence, in what way, if any, do you use it to (for example) reach a different corner of your audience or present science in a different sort of way?

The fact that I am approachable and pretty down to earth has allowed me to reach corners of society that more distant and fancy scientists would never even consider. For instance, I am going to a small university to give a talk. Some of my friends ask why I even bother, especially considering that this insitution is not the most renowned university. But, I feel the opposite – it is these corners that need the influence the most! Similarly, when I go to Hispanic high schools, many of the mothers have never seen a scientist. And there I am, a scientist from Mexico, speaking to them and their kids. It is that powerful combination of being a smart and warm female that can be shocking, which is cool.

In line with this, there was an experiment where women were asked to draw a female scientist. Most drew a plain, relatively unattractive woman. Immediately when you break that mold, it has an incredible effect. People say, “Hey! She kind of looks like me and she dresses like me. Maybe I can do science too!” Some girls are afraid that by being smart, boys won’t talk to them. My femininity allows me to be a voice in a field that has tended to isolate themselves from the public, which is bad. Some of my colleagues have become a little snobbish. The fact that I have serious credentials (PhD and 2 postdocs) shows that I had to work like crazy – looks and personality can only go so far. It s hard work that gets you there! Serious science communication has a lot of math and problem solving in order to explain things accurately to the public. So I still feel like I am doing science!

According to Leslie Brunetta, she now has much more hair than she had last July.

We became aware of Leslie Brunetta because of her book, Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, co-authored with Catherine L. Craig. Thanks to a piece Leslie wrote for the Concord Monitor (and excerpted here), we also learned that she is a breast cancer survivor. Leslie agreed to an interview about her experience, and in her emailed responses, she candidly talks about her diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up for her cancers, plural: She was diagnosed simultaneously with two types of breast cancer.

DXS: In your Concord Monitor piece, you describe the link between an understanding of the way evolution happens and some of the advances in modern medicine. What led you to grasp the link between the two?

LB: I think, because I’m not a scientist (I’m an English major), a lot of things that scientists think are obvious strike me as revelations. I somehow had never realized that the search for what would turn out to be DNA began with trying to explain how, in line with the theory of evolution by natural selection, variation arises and traits are passed from generation to generation. As I was figuring out what each chapter in Spider Silk would be about, I tried to think about the questions non-biologists like me would still have about evolution when they got to that point in the book. By the time we got past dragline silk, I realized that we had so far fleshed out the ways that silk proteins could and have evolved at the genetic level. But that explanation probably wouldn’t answer readers’ questions about how, for example, abdominal spinnerets—which are unique to spiders—might have evolved: the evolution of silk is easier to untangle than the evolution of body parts, which is why we focused on it in the first place.

I decided I wanted to write a chapter on “evo-devo,” evolutionary developmental biology, partly because there was a cool genetic study on the development of spinnerets that showed they’ve evolved from limbs. Fortunately, my co-author, Cay Craig, and editor at Yale, Jean Thomson Black, okayed the idea, because that chapter wasn’t in the original proposal. Writing that chapter, I learned why it took so long—nearly a century—to get from Darwin and Mendel to Watson and Crick and then so long again to get to where we are today. If we non-scientists understand something scientific, it’s often how it works, not how a whole string of people over the course of decades building on each other’s work discovered how it works. I knew evolution was the accumulation of gene changes, but, until I wrote that chapter, it hadn’t occurred to me that people began to look for genes because they wanted to understand evolution.

So that was all in the spider part of my life. Then, a few months into the cancer part of my life, I was offered a test called Oncotype DX, which would look at genetic markers in my tumor cells to develop a risk profile that could help me decide whether I should have chemotherapy plus tamoxifen or just tamoxifen. The results turned out to be moot in my case because I had a number of positive lymph nodes, although it was reassuring to find out that the cancer was considered low risk for recurrence. But still—the idea that a genetic test could let some women avoid chemo without taking on extra risk, that’s huge. No one would want to go through chemo if it wasn’t necessary. So by then I was thinking, “Thank you, Darwin!”

And then, coincidentally, the presidential primary season was heating up, and there were a number of serious candidates (well, serious in the sense that they had enough backing to get into the debates) who proudly declared that they had no time for the theory of evolution. And year after year these stupid anti-evolution bills are introduced in various state legislatures. While I was lying on the couch hanging out in the days after chemo sessions, I started thinking, “So, given that you don’t give any credence to Darwin and his ideas, would you refuse on principle to take the Oncotype test or gene-based therapies like Gleevec or Herceptin if you had cancer or if someone in your family had cancer? Somehow I don’t think so.” That argument is not going to convince hard-core denialists (nothing will), but maybe the cognitive dissonance in connection with something as concrete as cancer will make some people who waver want to find out more.

DXS: You mention having been diagnosed with two different forms of cancer, one in each breast. Can you say what each kind was and, if possible, how they differed?

LB: Yes, I unfortunately turned out to be an “interesting” case. This is one arena where, if you possibly can, you want to avoid being interesting. At first it seemed that I had a tiny lesion that was an invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and that I would “just” need a lumpectomy and radiation. Luckily for me, the doctor reading my mammogram is known as an eagle eye, and she saw a few things that—given the positive finding from the biopsy—concerned her. She recommended an MRI. In fact, even though I switched to another hospital for my surgery, she sent emails there saying I should have an MRI. That turned up “concerning” spots in both breasts, which led to more biopsies, which revealed multiple tiny cancerous lesions. The only reasonable option was then a double mastectomy.

The lesions in the right breast were IDCs. About 70% of breast cancers are diagnosed as IDCs. Those cancers start with the cells lining the milk ducts. The ones in the left breast were invasive lobular carcinomas (ILCs), which start in the lobules at the end of the milk ducts. Only about 10% of breast cancers are ILCs.

Oncologists hate lobular cancer. Unlike ductal cancers, which form as clumps of cells, lobular cancers form as single-file ribbons of cells. The tissue around ductal cancer cells reacts to those cells, which is why someone may feel a lump—she’s (or he’s) not feeling the cancer itself but the inflammation of the tissue around it. And because the cells clump, they show up more readily on mammograms. Not so lobular cancers. They mostly don’t give rise to lumps and they’re hard to spot on mammograms. They snake their way through tissue for quite a while without bothering anything.

In my case, this explains why last spring felt like an unremitting downhill slide. Every time someone looked deeper, they found something worse. It turned out that on my left side, the lobular side, I had multiple positive lymph nodes, which was why I needed not just chemo but also radiation (which usually isn’t given after a mastectomy). That was the side that didn’t even show up much on the mammogram. On the right side, the ductal side, which provoked the initial suspicions, my nodes were clear. I want to write about this soon, because I want to find out more about it. I’ve only recently gotten to the place emotionally where I think I can deal with reading the research papers as opposed to more general information. By the way, the resource that most helped us better understand what my doctors were talking about was Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. It was invaluable as we made our way through this process, although it turned out that I had very few decisions to make because there was usually only one good option.

DXS: As part of your treatment, you had a double mastectomy. One of our goals with this interview is to tell women what some of these experiences with treatment are like. If you’re comfortable doing so, could you tell us a little bit about what a double mastectomy entails and what you do after one in practical terms?

LB: A mastectomy is a strange operation. In a way, it’s more of an emotional and psychological experience than a physical experience. My surgeon, who was fantastic, is a man, and when we discussed the need for the mastectomies he said that I would be surprised at how little pain would be involved and how quick the healing would be. Even though I trusted him a lot by then, my reaction was pretty much, “Like you would know, right?” But he did know. When you think about it, it’s fairly non-invasive surgery. Unless the cancer has spread to the surrounding area, which doesn’t happen very often now due to early detection, no muscle or bone is removed. (Until relatively recently, surgeons removed the major muscle in the chest wall, and sometimes even bone, because they believed it would cut the risk of recurrence. That meant that many women lost function in their arm and also experienced back problems.) None of your organs are touched. They don’t go into your abdominal cavity. Also, until recently, they removed a whole clump of underarm lymph nodes when they did lumpectomies or mastectomies. Now they usually remove just a “sentinel node,” because they know that it will give them a fairly reliable indicator of whether the cancer has spread to the other nodes. That also makes the surgery less traumatic than it used to be.

I opted not to have reconstruction. Reconstruction is a good choice for many women, but I didn’t see many benefits for me and I didn’t like the idea of a more complicated surgery. My surgery was only about two hours. I don’t remember any pain at all afterwards, and my husband says I never complained of any. I was in the hospital for just one night. By the next day, I was on ibuprofen only. The bandages came off two days after the surgery.

That’s shocking, to see your breasts gone and replaced by thin red lines, no matter how well you’ve prepared yourself. It made the cancer seem much more real in some way than it had seemed before. In comparison, the physical recovery from the surgery was fairly minor because I had no infections or complications. There were drains in place for about 10 days to collect serum, which would otherwise collect under the skin, and my husband dealt with emptying them twice a day and measuring the amount. I had to sleep on my back, propped up, because of where the drains were placed, high up on my sides, and I never really got used to that. It was a real relief to have the drains removed.

My surgeon told me to start doing stretching exercises with my arms right away, and that’s really important. I got my full range of motion back within a couple of months. But even though I had my surgery last March, I’ve noticed lately that if I don’t stretch fully, like in yoga, things tighten up. That may be because of the radiation, though, because it’s only on my left side. Things are never quite the same as they were before the surgery, though. Because I did have to have the axillary nodes out on my left side, my lymph system is disrupted. I haven’t had any real problems with lymphedema yet, and I may never, but in the early months I noticed that my hands would swell if I’d been walking around a lot, and I’d have to elevate them to get them to drain back. That rarely happens now. But I’ve been told I need to wear a compression sleeve if I fly because the change in air pressure can cause lymph to collect. Also, I’m supposed to protect my hands and arms from cuts as much as possible. It seems to me that small nicks on my fingers take longer to heal than they used to. So even though most of the time it seems like it’s all over, I guess in those purely mechanical ways it’s never over. It’s not just that you no longer have breasts, it’s also that nerves and lymph channels and bits of tissue are also missing or moved around.

The bigger question is how one deals with now lacking breasts. I’ve decided not to wear prostheses. I can get away with it because I was small breasted, I dress in relatively loose clothes anyway, and I’ve gained confidence over time that no one notices or cares and I care less now if they do notice. But getting that self-confidence took quite a while. Obviously, it has an effect on my sex life, but we have a strong bond and it’s just become a piece of that bond. The biggest thing is that it’s always a bit of a shock when I catch sight of myself naked in a mirror because it’s a reminder that I’ve had cancer and there’s no getting around the fact that that sucks.

DXS: My mother-in-law completed radiation and chemo for breast cancer last year, and if I remember correctly, she had to go frequently for a period of weeks for radiation. Was that you experience? Can you describe for our readers what the time investment was like and what the process was like?

LB: I went for radiation 5 days a week for about 7 weeks. Three days a week, I’d usually be in and out of the hospital within 45 minutes. One day a week, I met with the radiology oncologist and a nurse to debrief, which was also a form of emotional therapy for me. And one day a week, they laid on a chair massage, and the nurse/massage therapist who gave the massage was great to talk to, so that was more therapy. Radiation was easy compared to chemo. Some people experience skin burning and fatigue, but I was lucky that I didn’t experience either. Because I’m a freelancer, the time investment wasn’t a burden for me. I’m also lucky living where I live, because I could walk to the hospital. It was a pleasant 3-mile round-trip walk, and I think the walking helped me a lot physically and mentally.

DXS: And now to the chemo. My interest in interviewing you about your experience began with a reference you made on Twitter to “chemo brain,” and of course, after reading your evolution-medical advances piece. Can you tell us a little about what the process of receiving chemotherapy is like? How long does it take? How frequently (I know this varies, but your experience)?

LB: Because of my age (I was considered young, which was always nice to hear) and state of general good health, my oncologist put me on a dose-dense AC-T schedule. This meant going for treatment every two weeks over the course of 16 weeks—8 treatment sessions. At the first 4 sessions, I was given Adriamycin and Cytoxan(AC), and the last 4 sessions I was given Taxol (T). The idea behind giving multiple drugs and giving them frequently is that they all attack cancer cells in different ways and—it goes back to evolution—by attacking them frequently and hard on different fronts, you’re trying to avoid selecting for a population that’s resistant to one or more of the drugs. They can give the drugs every two weeks to a lot of patients now because they’ve got drugs to boost the production of white blood cells, which the cancer drugs suppress. After most chemo sessions, I went back the next day for a shot of one of these drugs, Neulasta.

The chemo clinic was, bizarrely, a very relaxing place. The nurses who work there were fantastic, and the nurse assigned to me, Kathy, was always interesting to talk with. She had a great sense of humor, and she was also interested in the science behind everything we were doing, so if I ever had questions she didn’t have ready answers for, she’d find out for me. A lot of patients were there at the same time, but we each had a private space. You’d sit in a big reclining chair. They had TVs and DVDs, but I usually used it as an opportunity to read. My husband sat through the first session with me, and a close friend who had chemo for breast cancer 15 years ago sat through a few other sessions, but once I got used to it, I was comfortable being there alone. Because of the nurses, it never felt lonely.

I’d arrive and settle in. Kathy would take blood for testing red and white blood counts and, I think, liver function and some other things, and she’d insert a needle and start a saline drip while we waited for the results. I’ve always had large veins, so I opted to have the drugs administered through my arm rather than having a port implanted in my chest. Over the course of three to four hours, she’d change the IV bags. Some of the bags were drugs to protect against nausea, so I’d start to feel kind of fuzzy—I don’t think I retained a whole lot of what I read there! The Adriamycin was bright orange; they call it the Red Devil, because it can chew up your veins—sometimes it felt like it was burning but Kathy could stop that by slowing the drip. Otherwise, it was fairly uneventful. I’d have snacks and usually ate lunch while still hooked up.

I was lucky I never had any reactions to any of the drugs, so actually getting the chemo was a surprisingly pleasant experience just because of the atmosphere. On the one hand, you’re aware of all these people around you struggling with cancer and you know things aren’t going well for some of them, so it’s heartbreaking, and also makes you consider, sometimes fearfully, your own future no matter how well you’re trying to brace yourself up. But at the same time, the people working there are so positive, but not in a Pollyannaish-false way, that they helped me as I tried to stay positive. The social worker stopped in with each patient every session, and she was fantastic—I could talk out any problems or fears I had with her, and that helped a huge amount.

DXS: Would you be able to run us through a timeline of the physical effects of chemotherapy after an infusion? How long does it take before it hits hardest? My mother-in-law told me that her biggest craving, when she could eat, was for carb-heavy foods like mashed potatoes and for soups, like vegetable soup. What was your experience with that?

LB: My biggest fear when I first learned I would need chemo was nausea. My oncologist told us that they had nausea so well controlled that over the past few years, she had only had one or two patients who had experienced it. As with the surgeon’s prediction about mastectomy pain, this turned out to be true: I never had even a single moment of nausea.

But there were all sorts of other effects. For the first few days after a session, the most salient effects were actually from the mix of drugs I took to stave off nausea. I generally felt pretty fuzzy, but not necessarily sleepy—part of the mix was steroids, so you’re a little hyped. There’s no way I’d feel safe driving on those days, for example. I’d sleep well the first three nights because I took Ativan, which has an anti-nausea effect. But except for those days, my sleep was really disrupted. Partly that’s because, I’m guessing, the chemo hits certain cells in your brain and partly it’s because you get thrown into chemical menopause, so there were a lot of night hot flashes. Even though I’d already started into menopause, this chemo menopause was a lot more intense and included all the symptoms regularly associated with menopause.

By the end of the first session, I was feeling pretty joyful because it was much less bad than I had thought it would be. By the second week in the two-week cycle, I felt relatively normal. But even though it never got awful, the effects started to accumulate. My hair started to fall out the morning I was going to an award ceremony for Spider Silk. It was ok at the ceremony, but we shaved it off that night. I decided not to wear a wig. First, it was the summer, and it would have been hot. Second, I usually have close to a buzz cut, and I can’t imagine anyone would make a wig that would look anything like my hair. My kids’ attitude was that everyone would know something was wrong anyway, so I should just be bald, and that helped a lot. But it’s hard to see in people’s eyes multiple times a day their realization that you’re in a pretty bad place. Also, it’s not just your head hair that goes. So do your eyebrows, your eyelashes, your pubic hair, and most of the tiny hairs all over your skin. And as your skin cells are affected by the chemo (the chemo hits all fast-reproducing cells), your skin itself gets more sensitive and then is not protected by those tiny hairs. I remember a lot of itching. And strange things like my head sticking to my yoga mat and my reading glasses sticking to the side of my head instead of sliding over my ears.

I never lost my appetite, but I did have food cravings during the AC cycles. I wanted sushi and seaweed salad, of all things. And steak. My sense of taste went dull, so I also wanted things that tasted strong and had crunch. I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol, partly because of the sleep issues but partly because it didn’t taste very good anyway. I drank loads of water on the advice of the oncologist, the nurses, and my acupuncturist, and I think that helped a lot.

During the second cycle, I developed a fever. That was scary. I was warned that if I ever developed a fever, I should call the oncologist immediately, no matter the time of day or day of week. The problem is that your immune response is knocked down by the chemo, so what would normally be a small bacterial infection has the potential to rage out of control. I was lucky. We figured out that the source of infection was a hemorrhoid—the Adriamycin was beginning to chew into my digestive tract, a well-known side effect. (Having to pay constant attention to yet another usually private part of the body just seemed totally unfair by this point.) Oral antibiotics took care of it, which was great because I avoided having to go into the hospital and all the risks entailed with getting heavy-duty IV antibiotic treatment. And we were also able to keep on schedule with the chemo regimen, which is what you hope for.

After that, I became even more careful about avoiding infection, so I avoided public places even more than I had been. I’m very close to a couple of toddlers, and I couldn’t see them for weeks because they were in one of those toddler constant-viral stages, and I really missed them.

The Taxol seems to be much less harsh than the AC regimen, so a lot of these side effects started to ease off a bit by the second 8 weeks, which was certainly a relief.

I was lucky that I didn’t really have mouth sores or some of the other side effects. Some of this is, I think, just because besides the cancer I don’t have any other health issues. Some of it is because my husband took over everything and I don’t have a regular job, so I had the luxury of concentrating on doing what my body needed. I tried to walk every day, and I slept when I needed to, ate when and what I needed to, and went to yoga class when my immune system was ok. I also went to acupuncture every week. I know the science is iffy on that, but I think it helped me with the side effects, even if it was the placebo effect at work (I’m a big fan of the placebo effect). We also both had extraordinary emotional support from many friends and knew we could call lots of people if we needed anything. That’s huge when you’re in this kind of situation.

Currently, I’m still dealing with some minor joint pains, mostly in my wrists and feet. I wasn’t expecting this problem, but my oncologist says it’s not uncommon: they think it’s because your immune system has to re-find its proper level of function, and it can go into overdrive and set up inflammation in the joints. That’s gradually easing off, though.

Most people don’t have it as easy as I did in terms of the medical, financial, and emotional resources I had to draw on. I’m very mindful of that and very grateful.

DXS: You say that you had “few terrible side effects” and a “very cushy home situation.” I’m sure any woman would like to at least be able to experience the latter while dealing with a full-body chemical attack. What were some factors that made it “cushy” that women might be able to talk to their families or caregivers about replicating for them?

LB: As I’ve said, some of it is just circumstance. For example, my kids were old enough to be pretty self-sufficient and old enough to understand what was going on, which meant both that they needed very little from me in terms of care and also that they were less scared than they might have been if they were younger. My husband happens to be both very competent (more competent than I am) around the house and very giving. I live in Cambridge, MA, where I could actually make choices about where I wanted to be treated at each phase and know I’d get excellent, humane care and where none of the facilities I went to was more than about 20 minutes away.

Some things that women might have some control over and that their families might help nudge them toward:

Find doctors you trust. Ask a lot of questions and make sure you understand the answers. But don’t get hung up on survival or recurrence statistics. There’s no way to know for sure what your individual outcome will be. Go for the treatment that you and your doctors believe will give you the best chance, and then assume as much as possible that your outcome will be good.

Make sure you talk regularly with a social worker or other therapist who specializes in dealing with breast cancer patients. If you have fears or worries that you don’t want to talk to your partner or family about, here’s where you’ll get lots of help.

Find compatible friends who have also had cancer to talk to. I had friends who showed me their mastectomy scars, who showed me their reconstructions, who told me about their experiences with chemo and radiation, who told me about what life after treatment was like (is still like decades later…). And none of them told me, “You should…” They all just told me what was hard for them and what worked for them and let me figure out what worked for me. Brilliant.

Try to get some exercise even if you don’t feel like it. It was often when I felt least like moving around that a short walk made me feel remarkably better. But I would forget that, so my husband would remind me. Ask someone to walk with you if you’re feeling weak. Getting your circulation going seems to help the body process the chemo drugs and the waste products they create. For the same reason, drink lots of water.

Watch funny movies together. Laughter makes a huge difference.

Pamper yourself as much as possible. Let people take care of you and help as much as they’re willing. But don’t be afraid to say no to anything that you don’t want or that’s too much.

Family members and caregivers should also take care of themselves by making some time for themselves and talking to social workers or therapists if they feel the need. It’s a big, awful string of events for everyone involved, not just the patient.

DXS: In the midst of all of this, you seem to have written a fascinating book about spiders and their webs. Were you able to work while undergoing your treatments? Were there times that were better than others for attending to work? Could work be a sort of occupational therapy, when it was possible for you to do it, to keep you engaged?

LB: The book had been published about 6 months before my diagnosis. The whole cancer thing really interfered not with the writing, but with my efforts to publicize it. I had started to build toward a series of readings and had to abandon that effort. I had also started a proposal for a new book and had to put that aside. I had one radio interview in the middle of chemo, which was kind of daunting but I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, and when I listen to it now, I can hear my voice sounds kind of shaky. It went well, but I was exhausted afterwards. Also invigorated, though—it made me feel like I hadn’t disappeared into the cancer. I had two streams of writing going on, both of which were therapeutic. I sent email updates about the cancer treatment to a group of friends—that was definitely psychological therapy. I also tried to keep the Spider Silk blog up to date by summarizing related research papers and other spider silk news—that was intellectual therapy. I just worked on them when I felt I wanted to. The second week of every cycle my head was usually reasonably clear.

I don’t really know whether I have chemo brain. I notice a lot of names-and-other-proper-nouns drop. But whether that’s from the chemo per se, or from the hormone changes associated with the chemically induced menopause, or just from emotional overload and intellectual distraction, I don’t know. I find that I’m thinking more clearly week by week.

DXS: What is the plan for your continued follow-up? How long will it last, what is the frequency of visits, sorts of tests, etc.?

LB: I’m on tamoxifen and I’ll be on that for probably two years and then either stay on that or go onto an aromatase inhibitor [Ed. note: these drugs block production of estrogen and are used for estrogen-sensitive cancers.] for another three years. I’ll see one of the cancer doctors every three months for at least a year, I think. They’ll ask me questions and do a physical exam and take blood samples to test for tumor markers. At some point the visits go to every six months.

For self-care, I’m exercising more, trying to lose some weight, and eating even better than I was before.

DXS: Last…if you’re comfortable detailing it…what led to your diagnosis in the first place?

LB: My breast cancer was uncovered by my annual mammogram. I’ve worried about cancer, as I suppose most people do. But I never really worried about breast cancer. My mother has 10 sisters and neither she nor any of them ever had breast cancer. I have about 20 older female cousins—I was 50 when I was diagnosed last year–and as far as I know none of them have had breast cancer. I took birth control pills for less than a year decades ago. Never smoked. Light drinker. Not overweight. Light exerciser. I breastfed both kids, although not for a full year. Never took replacement hormones. Never worked in a dangerous environment. Never had suspicious mammograms before. So on paper, I was at very low risk as far as I can figure out. After I finished intensive treatment, I was tested for BRCA1 and BRCA2 (because mutations there are associated with cancer in both breasts) and no mutations were found. Unless or until some new genetic markers are found and one of them applies to me, I think we’ll never know why I got breast cancer, other than the fact that I’ve lived long enough to get cancer. There was no lump. Even between the suspicious mammogram and ultrasound and the biopsy, none of the doctors examining me could feel a lump or anything irregular. It was a year ago this week that I got the news that the first biopsy was positive. In some ways, because I feel really good now, it’s hard to believe that this year ever happened. But in other ways, the shock of it is still with me and with the whole family. Things are good for now, though, and although I feel very unlucky that this happened in the first place, I feel extremely lucky with the medical care I received and the support I got from family and friends and especially my husband.

Leslie Brunetta’s articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times,Technology Review, and the Sewanee Review as well as on NPR and elsewhere. She is co-author, with Catherine L. Craig, of Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating (Yale University Press).

(Today’s guest post comes to us from Carrie Fitzgerald, a professor of astronomy at Montgomery College in Maryland. She directs the Montgomery College Observatory; this piece originally ran on her blog.)

Driving past the woodsy grounds of the US Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, you can’t help but notice the prominent “USNO Master Clock” displaying the time in bright red digits. That is part of their mission, after all, to “determine the positions and motions of celestial bodies, motions of the Earth, and precise time.”

How exactly do they do what they do? And who are these modern day keepers of time and celestial motion?

In the physics and engineering department at MC, we are particularly lucky to have Amy Fredericks as an adjunct astronomy professor, teaching the evening section of our Astronomy 101 course. Not only is Amy a dedicated and enthusiastic instructor, she is also a real live astronomer at the US Naval Observatory!

For students who have wondered how I set the times of the Observatory Open House nights (I base it on when civil twilight ends), or how I know how much of the Moon’s visible disk is illuminated (81% last open house), well, I owe it all to Amy and the USNO Data Services. If I were a leprechaun, the data services portion of the USNO website would be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s even better though, because the data services page is super easy to find.

Have you ever wanted to know more about what goes on inside the USNO and what goes into maintaining something as complex as the data services? Amy was generous enough to satisfy our curiosity about what she does during the daylight hours.

Q. I know you as our brilliant and intrepid evening astronomy instructor at Montgomery College, but you have a whole other life at the US Naval Observatory. How long have you been there, and what do you do?A. I have worked at USNO for 6 years, in the Astronomical Applications Department. You could say I’m both an astronomer and a computer programmer. My department, working in concert with Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office in the UK, produces the Astronomical, Nautical, and Air Almanacs. I work in the AA Department’s Software Products Division, which produces software and web applications related to the almanacs and also astrometry and celestial navigation.

I maintain the web applications and assist in the testing and maintenance of all our software products. Our website is http://aa.usno.navy.mil/.

Q. Is there a typical day for you at work? If so, what is it like?A. A typical day may include making updates to our website or our data services, attending status meetings on the latest upgrade to one of products, or helping to get that upgrade ready by testing it.

Q. The USNO in Washington, DC has telescopes. What kind of telescopes do you have and what are they used for?A. The biggest telescope we have in DC is the 26-inch refractor. It is the telescope that Asaph Hall used in 1877 at our old Foggy Bottom location to discover the moons of Mars. It is still used today (despite DC’s light pollution!) to study double stars and the moons of the outer planets. We have a few smaller telescopes that are also used for research.Our “dark sky” site is USNO’s Flagstaff Station in Arizona. That’s where we have some big reflecting telescopes that are used for viewing fainter objects than we can see from DC. One of them was used to discover Charon, the biggest moon of Pluto, in the 1970s.

Q. What is your favorite thing about being at the USNO?A. Our products are used by the military, the scientific community, and the public. I love being able to support all of our users. And, of course, I love the people I work with at the Observatory.

Q. Are you ever able to bring what you do at the USNO into the classroom?A. Sometimes I make passing references to it but not too much. I’m always trying to think of ways! I know friends at other colleges have assigned their students to use our website in their homework.

Q. The USNO is also the official residence of the vice president, so I have to ask…in all the time you’ve been at the USNO, any vice president sightings?A. Sadly, no! Just his helicopter and motorcade on occasion. He does use our library for news interviews, so the librarians probably see him the most.

Scene 1: Two fathers encounter each other at a Boy Scout meeting. After a little conversation, one reveals that his son won’t be playing football because of concerns about head injuries. The other father reveals that he and his son love football, that they spoke with their pediatrician about it, and that their son will continue with football at least into middle school. There’s a bit of wary nodding, and then, back to the Pinewood Derby.

Scene 2: Two mothers meet on a playground. After a little conversation about their toddlers, one mother mentions that she still breastfeeds and practices “attachment parenting,” which is why she has a sling sitting next to her. The other mother mentions that she practiced “cry it out” with her children but that they seem to be doing well and are good sleepers. Then one of the toddlers begins to cry, obviously hurt in some way, and both mothers rush over together to offer assistance.

Scene 3: In the evening, one of these parents might say to a partner, “Can you believe that they’re going to let him play football?” or “I can’t believe they’re still breastfeeding when she’s three!” Sure. They might “judge” or think that’s something that they, as parents, would never do.

But which ones are actually involved in a war?

War. What is it good for?

I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you the definition of ‘war’: “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state.” Based on this definition and persistent headlines about “Mommy Wars,” you might conclude that a visit to your local playground or a mom’s group outing might require decking yourself out cap-á-pie in Kevlar. But the reality on the ground is different. There is no war. Calling disputes and criticisms and judgments about how other people live “war” is like calling a rowboat on a pond the Titanic. One involves lots of energy release just to navigate relatively placid waters while the other involved a tremendous loss of life in a rough and frigid sea. Big difference.

I’m sure many mothers can attest to the following: You have friends who also are mothers. I bet that for most of us, those friends represent a spectrum of attitudes about parenting, education, religion, Fifty Shades of Grey, recycling, diet, discipline, Oprah, and more. They also probably don’t all dress just like you, talk just like you, have the same level of education as you, same employment, same ambitions, same hair, or same toothpaste. And I bet that for many of us, in our interactions with our friends, we have found ourselves judging everything from why she insists on wearing those shoes to why she lets little Timmy eat Pop Tarts. Yet, despite all of this mental observation and, yes, judging, we still manage to get along, go out to dinner together, meet at one another’s homes, and gab our heads off during play dates.

That’s not a war. That’s life. It’s using our brains as shaped by our cultural understanding and education and rejection or acceptance of things from our own upbringing and talks with medical practitioners and books we’ve read and television shows we’ve watched and, for some of us, Oprah. Not one single friend I have is a cookie cutter representation of me or how I parent. Yet, we are not at war. We are friends. Just because people go online and lay out in black and white the critiques that are in their heads doesn’t mean “war” is afoot. It means expressing the natural human instinct to criticize others in a way that we think argues for Our Way of Doing Things. Online fighting is keeping up with the virtual Joneses. In real life, we are friends with the Joneses, and everyone tacitly understands what’s off limits within the boundaries of that friendship. That’s not war. It’s friendly détente.

The reality doesn’t stop the news media from trying to foment wars, rebellions, and full-on revolutions with provocative online “debates” and, lately, magazine covers. The most recent, from Time, features a slender mother, hand on cocked hip, challenging you with her eyes as she nurses her almost-four-year-old son while he stands on a chair. As Time likely intended, the cover caused an uproar. We’ve lampooned it ourselves (see above).

But the question the cover asks in all caps, “Are you mom enough?” is even more manipulative than the cover because it strikes at the heart of all those unspoken criticisms we think–we know–other women have in their heads about our parenting. What we may not consider is that we, too, are doing the same, and still… we are not actually at war. We’re just women, judging ourselves and other women, just like we’ve done since the dawn of time. It’s called “using your brain.” Inflating our interactions and fairly easily achieved parental philosophy détentes to “war” caricatures us all as shrieking harpies, incapable of backing off and being reasonable.

The real question to ask isn’t “Are you mom enough?” In fact, it’s an empty question because there is no answer. Your parenting may be the most perfect replica of motherhood since the Madonna (the first one), yet you have no idea how that will manifest down the road in terms of who your child is or what your child does. Whether you’re a Grizzly or a Tiger or a Kangaroo or a Panda mother, there is no “enough.”

So, instead of asking you “Are you mom enough?”, in keeping with our goal of bringing women evidence-based science, we’ve looked at some of the research describing what might make a successful parent–child relationship. Yes, the answer is about attachment, but not necessarily of the physical kind. So drop your guilt. Read this when you have time. Meanwhile, do your best to connect with your child, understand your child, and respond appropriately to your child.

Why? Because that is what attachment is–the basic biological response to a child’s needs. If you’re not a nomad or someone constantly on the move, research suggests that the whole “physically attached to me” thing isn’t really a necessary manifestation of attachment. If you harken to it and your child enjoys it (mine did not) and it works for you without seeming like, well, an albatross around your neck, go for it.

What is attachment?

While attachment as a biological norm among primates has been around as long as primates themselves, humans are more complicated than most primates. We have theories. Attachment theory arose from the observations of a couple of human behaviorists or psychologists (depending on whom you ask), John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby derived the concept of attachment theory, in which an infant homes in on an attachment figure as a “safe place.” The attachment figure, usually a parent, is the person who responds and is sensitive to the infant’s needs and social overtures. That parent is typically the mother, and disruption of this relationship can have, as most of us probably instinctively know, negative effects.

Bowlby’s early approach involved the mother’s having an understanding of the formational experiences of her own childhood and then translating that to an understanding of her child. He even found that when he talked with parents about their own childhoods in front of their children, the result would be clinical breakthroughs for his patients. As he wrote,

Having once been helped to recognize and recapture the feelings which she herself had as a child and to find that they are accepted tolerantly and understandingly, a mother will become increasingly sympathetic and tolerant toward the same things in her child.

Later studies seem to bear out this observation of a connection to one’s childhood experiences and more connected parenting. For example, mothers who are “insightful” about their children, who seek to understand the motivations of their children’s behavior, positively influence both their own sensitivity and the security of their infant’s attachment to them.

While Bowlby’s research focused initially on the effects of absolute separation between mother and child, Mary Ainsworth, an eventual colleague of Bowlby, took these ideas of the need for maternal input a step further. Her work suggested to her that young children live in a world of dual and competing urges: to feel safe and to be independent. An attachment figure, a safe person, is for children an anchor that keeps them from become unmoored even as they explore the unknown waters of life. Without that security backing them up, a child can feel always unmoored and directionless, with no one to trust for security.

Although he was considered an anti-Freudian rebel, Bowlby had a penchant for Freudian language like “superego” and referred to the mother as the “psychic organizer.” Yet his conclusions about the mother–child bond resonate with their plain language:

The infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.

You know, normal biological stuff. As a side note, he was intrigued by the fact that social bonds between mother and offspring in some species weren’t necessarily tied to feeding, an observation worth keeping in mind if you have concerns about not being able to breastfeed.

The big shift here in talking about the mother–child relationship was that Bowlby was proposing that this connection wasn’t some Freudian libidinous communion between mother and child but instead a healthy foundation of a trust relationship that could healthily continue into the child’s adulthood.

Ainsworth carried these ideas to specifics, noting in the course of her observations of various groups how valuable a mother’s sensitivity to her child’s behaviors were in establishing attachment. In her most famous study, the “Baltimore study” [PDF], she monitored 26 families with new babies. She found that “maternal responsiveness” in the context of crying, feeding, playing, and reciprocating seemed to have a powerful influence on how much a baby cried in later months, although some later studies dispute specific influences on crying frequencies.

Ainsworth also introduced the “Strange Situation” lab test, which seems to have freaked people out when it first entered the research scene. In this test, over the course of 20 minutes, a one-year-old baby is in a room full toys, first with its mother, then with mother and a strange woman, then with the stranger only (briefly), then with the mother, and then alone before the stranger and then the mother return. The most interesting findings of the study came from when the mother returned after her first absence, having left the baby alone in the room with a stranger. Some babies seemed quite angry, wanting to be with their mothers but expressing unhappiness with her at the same time and physically rejecting her.

From her observations during the Strange Situation, Ainsworth identified three types of attachment. The first was “Secure,” which, as its name implies, suggested an infant secure and comfortable with an attachment figure, a person with whom the infant actively seeks to interact. Then there’s the insecure–avoidant attachment type, in which an infant clearly is not interested in being near or interacting with the attachment figure. Most complex seems to be the insecure–resistant type, and the ambivalence of the term reflects the disconnected behavior the infant shows, seeming to want to be near the attachment figure but also resisting, as some of the unhappy infants described above behaved in the Strange Situation.

Within these types are now embedded various subtypes, including a disorganized–disoriented type in which the infant shows “odd” and chaotic behavior that seems to have no distinct pattern related to the attachment figure.

As you read this, you may be wondering, “What kind of attachment do my child and I have?” If you’re sciencey, you may fleetingly even have pondered conducting your own Strange Situation en famille to see what your child does. I understand the impulse. But let’s read on.

What are the benefits of attachment?

Mothers who are sensitive to their children’s cues and respond in ways that are mutually satisfactory to both parties may be doing their children a lifetime of favors, in addition to the parental benefit of a possibly less-likely-to-cry child. For example, a study of almost 1300 families looked at levels of cortisol, the “stress” hormone, in six-month-old infants and its association with maternal sensitivity to cues and found lower levels in infants who had “more sensitive” mothers.

Our understanding of attachment and its importance to infant development can help in other contexts. We can apply this understanding to, for example, help adolescent mothers establish the “secure” level of attachment with their infants. It’s also possibly useful in helping women who are battling substance abuse to still establish a secure attachment with their children.

On a more individual level, it might help in other ways. For example, if you want your child to show less resistance during “clean-up” activities, establishing “secure attachment” may be your ticket to a better-looking playroom.

More seriously, another study has found that even the way a mother applies sensitivity can be relevant. Using the beautiful-if-technical term ‘dyads’ to refer to the mother–child pair, this study included maternal reports of infant temperament and observations of maternal sensitivity to both infant distress and “non-distress.” Further, the authors assessed the children behaviorally at ages 24 and 36 months for social competence, behavioral problems, and typicality of emotional expression. They found that a mother’s sensitivity to an infant’s distress behaviors was linked to fewer behavioral problems and greater social competence in toddlerhood. Even more intriguing, the child’s temperament played a role: for “temperamentally reactive” infants, a mother’s sensitivity to distress was linked to less dysregulation of the child’s emotional expression in toddlerhood.

And that takes me to the child, the partner in the “dyad”

You’re not the only person involved in attachment. As these studies frequently note, you are involved in a “dyad.” The other member of that dyad is the child. As much as we’d like to think that we can lock down various aspects of temperament or expression simply by forcing it with our totally excellent attachment skills, the child in your dyad is a person, too, who arrived with a bit of baggage of her own.

And like the study described above, the child’s temperament is a key player in the outcome of the attachment tango. Another study noted that multiple factors influence “attachment quality.” Yes, maternal sensitivity is one, but a child’s native coping behaviors and temperament also seem to be involved. So, there you have it. If you’re feeling like a parental failure, science suggests you can quietly lay at least some of the blame on the Other in your dyad–your child. Or, you could acknowledge that we’re all human and this is just part of our learning experience together.

What does attachment look like, anyway?

Dr. William Sears took the concept of attachment and its association with maternal sensitivity to a child’s cues and security and… wrote a book that literally translated attachment as a physical as well as emotional connection. This extension of attachment–which Sears appends to every aspect of parenting, from pregnancy to feeding to sleeping–has become in the minds of some parents a prescriptive way of doing things with benefits that exclude all other parenting approaches or “philosophies.” It also involves the concept of “baby wearing,” which always brings up strange images in my mind and certainly takes outré fashion to a whole new level. In reality, it’s just a way people have carried babies for a long time in the absence of other easy modes of transport.

When I was pregnant with our first child and still blissfully ignorant about how little control parents have over anything, I read Sears’ book about attachment parenting. Some of it is common-sense, broadly applicable parenting advice: respond to your child’s needs. Some of it is simply downright impossible for some parent–child dyads, and much of it is based on the presumption that human infants in general will benefit from a one-size-fits-all sling of attachment parenting, although interpretations of the starry-eyed faithful emphasize that more than Sears does.

Because much of what Sears wrote resonated with me, we did some chimeric version of attachment parenting–or, we tried. The thing is, as I noted above, the infant has some say in these things as well. Our oldest child, who is autistic, was highly resistant to being physically attached much of the time. He didn’t want to sleep with us past age four months, and he showed little interest in aspects of attachment parenting like “nurturing touch,” which to him was seemingly more akin to “taser touch.” We ultimately had three sons, and in the end, they all preferred to sleep alone, each at an earlier and earlier age. The first two self-weaned before age one because apparently, the distractions of the sensory world around them were far more interesting than the same boring old boob they kept seeing immediately in front of their faces. Our third was unable to breastfeed at all.

So, like all parents do, we punted, in spite of our best laid plans and intentions. Our hybrid of “attachment parenting” could better be translated into “sensitivity parenting,” because our primary focus, as we punted and punted and punted our way through the years, was shifting our responses based on what our children seemed to need and what motivated their behaviors. Thus, while our oldest declined to sleep with us according to the attachment parenting commandment, he got to sleep with a boiled egg because that’s what he wanted. Try to beat that, folks, and sure, bring on the judging.

The Double X ScienceSensitivity Parenting (TM) cheat sheet.

What does “sensitive” mean?

And finally, the nitty-gritty bullet list you’ve been waiting for. If attachment doesn’t mean slinging your child to your body until you’re lumbar gives out or the child receives a high-school diploma, and parenting is, indeed, one compromise after another based on the exigencies of the moment, what consistent tenets can you practice that meet the now 60-year-old concept of “secure” attachment between mother and child, father and child, or mother or father figure and child? We are Double X Science, here to bring you evidence-based information, and that means lists. The below list is an aggregate of various research findings we’ve identified that seem reasonable and reasonably supported. We’ve also provided our usual handy quick guide for parents in a hurry.

Plan ahead. We know that life is what happens while you’re planning things, but… life does happen, and plans can at least serve as a loose guide to navigation. So, plan that you will be a parent who is sensitive to your child’s needs and will work to recognize them.

Practice emotion detection. Work on that. It doesn’t come easily to everyone because the past is prologue to what we’re capable of in the present. Ask yourself deliberately what your child’s emotion is communicating because behavior is communication. Be the grownup, even if sometimes, the wailing makes you want your mommy. As one study I found notes, “Crying is an aversive behavior.” Yes, maybe it makes you want to cover your ears and run away screaming. But you’re the grownup with the analytical tools at hand to ask “Why” and seek the answer.

Have infant-oriented goals. If you tend to orient your goals in your parent–child dyad toward a child-related benefit (relieve distress) rather than toward a parent-oriented goal (fitting your schedule in some way), research suggests that your dyad will be a much calmer and better mutually adapted dyad.

Trust yourself and keep trying. If your efforts to read your child’s feelings or respond to your child’s needs don’t work right away, don’t give up, don’t read Time magazine covers, and don’t listen to that little voice in your head saying you’re a bad parent or the voice in other people’s heads screaming that at you. Just keep trying. It’s all any of us can do, and we’re all going to screw this up here and there.

Practice behaviors that are supportive of an infant’s sensory needs. For example, positive inputs like a warm voice and smiling are considered more effective than a harsh voice or being physically intrusive. Put yourself in your child’s place and ask, How would that feel? That’s called empathy.

Engage in reciprocation. Imitating back your infant’s voice or faces, or showing joint attention–all forms of joint engagement–are ways of telling an infant or young child that yes, you are the anchor here, the one to trust, and really good time, to boot. Allowing this type of attention to persist as long as the infant chooses rather than shifting away from it quickly is associated with making the child comfortable with independence and learning to regulate behaviors.

Talk to your child. We are generally a chatty species, but we also need to learn to chat. “Rich language input” is important in early child development beginning with that early imitation of your infant’s vocalizations.

Lather, rinse, repeat, adjusting dosage as necessary based on age, weight, developmental status, nanosecond-rate changes in family dynamics and emotional conditions, the teen years, and whether or not you have access to chocolate. See? This stuff is easy.

Finally

As you read these lists and about research on attachment, you’ll see words like “secure” and “warm” and “intimate” and “safe.” Are you doing this for your child or doing your best to do it? Then you are, indeed, mom enough, whether you wear your baby or those shoes or both. That doesn’t mean that when you tell other women the specifics of your parenting tactics, they won’t secretly be criticizing you. Sure, we’ll all do that. And then a toddler will cry, we’ll drop it, and move on to mutually compatible things.

Yes, if we’re being honest, it makes most of us feel better to think that somehow, in some way, we’re kicking someone else’s ass in the parenting department. Unfortunately for that lowly human instinct, we’re all parenting unique individuals, and while we may indeed kick ass uniquely for them, our techniques simply won’t extend to all other children. It’s not a war. It’s human… humans raising other humans. Not one thing we do, one philosophy we follow, will guarantee the outcome we intend. We don’t even need science, for once, to tell us that.

On Mother’s Day, scientist and blogger Kate Clancy wrote an excellent post at Scientific American about allomothers, the people in your circle of friends and family who support mothers in their mothering. In thanking the allomothers in her life, Clancy included in that list her husband because men can be allomothers, too. Although this site is called Double X because we want to bring evidence-based science–and yes, some snark–to women, tomorrow is Father’s Day. So today, we’re shifting into XY gear and talking about allofathers.

We all have or had fathers. Some for better, some for worse, some we may never have even seen. Many of us also have had other men in our lives who participated in a father role or who supported our fathers in the same way that Clancy writes about supporting mothers. The funny thing is, a Google search on “allofathers” confuses Google so badly that it actually declines to do that search and instead offers a search on “allomothers.” When you force it to search “allofather,” you get only three pages of scanty hits, some of which reference a more general “alloparenting.”

Why no love for the allofathers, Google? Fathers these days need allo support as much as mothers, or at least, the fathers I know do. As Paul Raeburn writes in this Father’s Day piece:

The grindingly slow recovery of the economy is making it hard for fathers to earn enough to help support their families. Those who do have jobs are working more hours, taking time away from checkers and family dinners. In many families, both parents are working, leaving less time for fathers and partners to work on their relationships with each other.

He notes that fathers these days thrive in a habitat that allows the time with family, time to do things other than make a living wage, although that remains an important feature of fatherhood and a key goal of every father I know. In fact, that emphasis means that my spouse–who is also the father of my children–is at work right now, on Saturday, after already putting in overtime through the week. Indeed, he may have to work tomorrow, on Father’s Day, and is looking at a midnight deadline Monday night. There will be no games of chess with Dad this weekend.

The work is difficult enough and in a trying environment. And pushing against this need to work hard and keep a job is also a desire to have the kind of family time those of us in the United States have come to expect on weekends, particularly when we work salaried weekday jobs that ostensibly promise weekends off. That means that on top of the anxiety associated with stacking 20 or 30 extra hours onto a 40-hour work week to meet a tough deadline, my husband and my children’s father also feels angst about this inability to be a part of our family time. These are first-world problems, I realize, but that doesn’t make them any less real for us and our children.

So I’m allofathering for him. Yes, I’m the mother, but I’m also supporting my husband’s fathering role, in part by doing things that assure him that we’re all OK, and in part by doing things with our sons that people might think of as stereotypically “dad” activities: fishing, baseball, football, soccer, hiking. But I also have taken on the things he usually does around the house, like emptying the dishwasher Every Single Time, vacuuming, and doing the laundry. Bless the man, he usually does all the laundry. But I do miss the other allofathers in our lives.

We no longer live a stone’s throw or a short-ish drive from our extended family, but when we did and still when we visit, the allofathers are abundant. My children have uncles who take them fishing, monitor group infighting among nine cousins, catch snakes with them, play football and soccer with them, and take them on hikes and (fruitless) dove hunting. My husband does his share of allofathering for their children, reading books and playing with the youngest, making dinners, and serving as an ever-necessary playground monitor. And my children have a grandfather who builds things in his shop for them, closely monitors their BB gun target practice, wanders for hours with them in nearby woods to find animal bones, and patiently acknowledges every single mystifying LEGO construction and rambling imaginary story surrounding it.

All of these alloparents expand the parenting and support and safety net for my children. They are the village raising my sons, and my children trust them implicitly. These allofathers summon up reserves of energy they probably didn’t know they had and in spending this time with their nephews or grandchildren, they add layers of complexity and different insights from father figures that my children wouldn’t otherwise have. They also model for children like my sons the many roles a man can have through life.

As humans, we fit several features of species that engage in this extra-parental parenting, including typically having a single offspring at a time, a relatively small number of offspring over a lifetime, and an extended period of parental investment, and being part of a highly social species with tight family bonds. It may be that as our culture evolves so that the father role expands into what was previously considered maternal territory, we need to more closely consider allofathers as well as allomothers. These factors that characterize us as an alloparenting species can add up to benefits and greater success for mothers and fathers and children alike. At any rate, I know that’s been the case in our family.

When I was growing up, I had four grandmothers and four grandfathers. Half of them were “step” grandparents, obviously, but I loved the fact that I had all of these grandparents, blissfully unaware in my childhood of the fractures and angst that had led to their presence in my life. Among these step-grandparents was the man who married my mother’s mother. They met over square-dancing, he a handsome architect, she a tiny, fiery single mother who could sew some kick-ass square-dancing outfits.

Through various unanticipated turns in Life’s do-se-do, after marrying my grandmother, this man one day became father to two of my cousins. From their early childhoods, he has been their father, even though for the rest of us cousins, he was our step-grandfather. Along with my grandmother, he committed himself to rearing them and being their parent, and today, in part thanks to his steady, calm presence, they are successful, happily married parents themselves. Without his stabilizing influence, their paths might have been much less straightforward.

While what my step-grandfather did crossed over from alloparenting to being an actual father, my own children have a step-grandfather of their own who, I think, epitomizes allofathering. When we visit, he has a ready store of caps available for all the cap guns he buys them by the dozen (if you think there are a lot of guns in this post, there are; it’s Texas). He actually builds–builds–go carts and other motorized vehicles to take them buzzing around the large property where he and my mother live and maintains a fleet of bicycles for them to ride. He will drop anything to run a quick errand just because one of the youngest generation expresses a wish for a certain treat or toy. Ask him to make you an ax from a stick and a rock, and he’ll do it masterfully. He attends every volleyball, baseball, or basketball game my niece and nephew have and has simply been a steady and much-loved allofather figure in the lives of all of the youngest generation in our family.

When I think of men like these who enter into lives already structured around complex family interactions and who take on without comment or resentment the care and loving of the children in that family, I wonder if I could be as kind or selfless. Of course, I hope that I could. These little people are, after all, children, and they need love and support and classic grandparental spoiling and an understanding that parenting and parental love come in different forms and different ways of expression. To all the allofathers in my life, I–and my children–are extremely grateful. To all the fathers and allofathers out there, happy Father’s Day. And may I say, I think you all warrant more Google hits.

***Special thanks to Kate Clancy for her post on allomothers and to Paul Raeburn for his post about the role of fathers today, which certainly drove my thinking about this topic.***

These views are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily either reflect or disagree with those of the DXS editorial team.